When all think alike, no one thinks very much.
—Walter Lippman
In 2007, the scholar Barry Latzer sounded the alarm following his review of several social work education programs, stating: “Reckoned against traditional academic ideals of open-inquiry, partisan disengagement, and intellectual pluralism, the results are scandalous.”1 He concluded his scathing review this way:
We rightly expect all professions that deal with the human condition to be grounded in genuine sympathy. But we also rightly expect those professions to recognize and teach the importance of the continuing search for the truth, the need to listen to alternative views, and the need to seek objective bases for best practice.
Thus it is unacceptable when schools of social work define the substance of what they teach in terms of prescribed answers to important questions that are in fact unsettled.… Schools of social work have educational obligations to their students and intellectual obligations to the university and society.… [S]chools of social work are betraying the pursuit of knowledge and systematically perverting the education of their students. This, together with the larger university community’s failure to take the necessary corrective action, constitutes a genuine academic scandal [emphasis added].2
These criticisms occurred among various calls over the past century questioning the status of social work as a profession, most notably and recently being the March 2025 Special Issue published by the Journal of Teaching in Social Work titled “Beyond Ideological Mandates: Critical Reflections on Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Social Work Education”3.
Since the Special Issue’s publication, however, I remain with lingering thoughts about the status of my profession, its knowledge base and ideological bent, and hopeful of ways it can be rebalanced. This is in light of ethical and practical reasons given its unchanging status as a predominantly practice- and service-based profession in a country that holds a diverse set of socio-political beliefs and values.
Positionality Statements: A Performative Microcosm?
In a recent stint in graduate school, I recall a curious practice we were taught regarding “positionality statements,” described as a way for researchers to effectively show their cards and state how their values, beliefs, experiences, and various kinds of identity markers can influence the research project.4 Homan5 argues that “When we assess our biases (and what shapes them) we can ensure our work is well-informed, intentional, and respectful towards those we work with and whose work we draw from.”
When I first learned of positionality statements, I recoiled: Why should I inject myself into my research in this personal kind of way? Shouldn’t my research speak for itself? What’s the benefit of people potentially being proactively swayed by my self-disclosure of personal markers and characteristics? Won’t self-disclosing my biases end up inadvertently biasing the reader of my research and undermine my project? However, with the help of a philosophy of science class, I came to appreciate a common philosophical assumption about research: that of the “myth” of a value-free science and inherent challenge of cleanly separating one’s biases and assumptions from the research.6
This practice is not without its critics. Some have described these statements as being merely “performative” or as a form of “naval gazing.” Given that social work remains a practice- and service-based profession, however, I contend that this practice can be better seen as a microcosm in which our discipline misses the forest for the trees: If this kind of practice is meant to 1) expose and address biases; 2) acknowledge how they may influence projects; and 3) protect the research process and people/participants, what efforts are being made in the academy for training social workers to translate this and do the same in the field with people and clients we are tasked to work with?
Given the ideological and political leaning of the profession,7 professoriate,8 students,9 and socio-political leaning of social work educational standards,10 how do we ensure that social work’s knowledge base is sensitive and inclusive to the beliefs, values, politics, and experiences of people from all walks of life?
For example, a July 2025 Pew Research poll suggests 46 percent and 45 percent of Americans lean Republican and Democratic, respectively. In the 2024 Presidential Election, the Republican and Democratic parties received 49.8 percent and 48.3 percent, respectively, of the popular vote. At least half of the U.S. population holds sociopolitical beliefs and values that are not reflected in academia overall, and even less so in the field of social work.
This makes me concerned about teaching practices being implemented to ensure future generations of social workers can be sensitive to all sorts of political beliefs and values they will likely encounter in the field. After all, the National Association of Social Worker’s (NASW) Code of Ethics explicitly mentions in more than one instance that social workers should not only avoid discriminating on the basis of political beliefs, but should also take pains to “demonstrate understanding of culture and its function in human behavior and society,” as well as “demonstrate understanding of the nature of social diversity and oppression with respect to race, ethnicity … political belief, [and] religion.”
Furthermore, the Code also explicitly states that social workers—and the social work professoriate, I would argue, given their intellectual stewardship as they teach future social work practitioners— “should not take unfair advantage of any professional relationship or exploit others to further their personal [or] … political … interests.”11
The Representation Argument
On June 25, 2025, Shaun Harper, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Business, and Public Policy from the University of Southern California (USC), testified in front of the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for their hearing on “Sacrificing Excellence for Ideology: The Real Cost of DEI.” In the recording uploaded on Forbes’ YouTube channel, Dr. Harper is questioned by Representative Brandon Gill (R-TX), and asked two particular questions in succession: “Do you believe that race should be considered in employer hiring practices?” and “Which race do you think should be preferred?,” although Gill eventually asks “Why don’t you explain what you believe?”
Dr. Harper responded in two different instances, stating “I believe that diversity ought to be considered as companies and other organizations attempt to reflect their customers, our country” and “What I believe is that the demographic composition of workplaces, our nation’s military, and so on—our congress, ought to reflect the diversity of the United States of America.” This idea of various policies, programs, institutions, et cetera needing to reflect—commonly expressed as representation—people from underrepresented demographic groups is a key concept in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks and initiatives.
The question I’ve been left with, however, has been: where in contemporary social work education and, in particular, educational standards, is there language pertaining to the importance of representing a diversity of socio-political beliefs and values, especially those that differ from or go against the predominant narratives?
Given the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) function as the sole accrediting agency for social work education in the United States, their explicit values committing to behaviors “consistent with anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (ADEIB) in our actions,” and the ideological leaning of their Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS), I don’t sense genuine attempts on a larger scale for being more considerate and inclusive of the array of socio-political beliefs of students, faculty, and clientele.
I also suspect that given the sort of language appearing on the NASW website, the practice segment of the profession—a workforce of over 750,000 in the United States alone12—will likely not remain unaffected either. The field of mental health is also worth mentioning as social work’s presence in it is substantial. A 2025 analysis suggested that social workers comprise over 500,000 of the “total supply” of the behavioral health workforce.13 One recent study suggests that over half (59 percent) of social workers identify as clinical social workers,14 while another study noted the intent of recent social work graduates, suggesting that almost 80 percent report a desire to become a clinical social worker.15
As such, it is important to also call out the potential influence of social work’s unchecked ideological educational bias on the field of clinical social work, psychotherapy, and mental health. Conversely, I, as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist for over a decade, have developed a “simple” twofold set of principles that enable my work with clients from all walks of life:
- I adapt to the experiences of the client in front of me, especially to help establish rapport and a strong working relationship—factors absolutely crucialfor good clinical care that, unfortunately, take a backseat in graduate school.Whether I see a “far-left liberal” or “staunch conservative”—or anyone in between—I don’t necessarily endorse or push back on their views but simply try to understand where they are coming from and how their story or narrative fits into their suffering.
- I also do my best to cultivate a space in which the unsayable becomes sayable—the most taboo thoughts, darkest fears, shameful and unconscionable views, et cetera. Most people I see in clinic are not in the loop—nor care to be—of the current buzzwords and narratives discussed in the ivory tower. Most are suffering, struggling, and in pain, irrespective of their background, identity markers, or socioeconomic status. Distress doesn’t discriminate. My clients’ socio-political beliefs and values are of no interest to me—unless their beliefs and values are preventing them from alleviating their distress and building a worthy life.
Given the wide diversity of socio-political beliefs and partisan affiliations of the U.S. population—including the clients social workers serve—it follows from both practical necessity and the standards articulated in the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics that social workers must be prepared to work with individuals from every walk of life. For that reason, it is an ethical imperative that a comparable degree of viewpoint diversity and intellectual pluralism be reflected in social work training programs across the country. Social work cannot credibly claim to uphold the principles of diversity and inclusion while selectively embracing only certain forms of diversity. Nor, within a university setting, can it legitimately narrow the range of ideas, questions, and perspectives deemed worthy of exploration and reflection.
Concluding Thoughts
It should be stated that the tone of my argument in this essay should not be interpreted as suggesting we should instill academic gatekeepers to ensure a “representative” socio-political makeup of social work faculty and students. As it is, a sort of gatekeeping technique in the form of “diversity statements” have already been used as political litmus tests and subjected to fierce criticism.
Instead, we should return to and follow Barry Latzer’s suggestions to revise social work education standards and eliminate political litmus tests:
The Council on Social Work Education … must revise its Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards to eliminate ideological code words and the ideology that stands behind them.… The only standards that are academically legitimate are those that respect a plurality of viewpoints and omit political requirements….
But there is no ethical imperative for social workers to adopt a particular ideological viewpoint and it is decidedly unethical to demand such of students as a condition for entry into the profession.16
Lest our field become perceived as an “undisciplined discipline,”17 we’re long overdue for an ideological rebalancing. Our current and future clients and practitioners deserve it.
Arnoldo Cantú is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist residing in northern Colorado with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health. He works clinically with children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú has written critically about the idea of so-called mental disorder as well as “race” categories. Cantú, with Nathan Gallo, contributed “Will Trump’s Executive Order on Accreditation Rebalance Social Work?” to our Winter 2025 issue.
1 Barry Latzer, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,”National Association of Scholars, September 11, 2007, https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the_scandal_of_social_work_education, para. 14. A PDF of the review can be found here: https://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheScandalofSocialWorkEducation.pdf.
2 Ibid., 19-20.
3 Vicki Lens, Naomi Farber, Mary Fram, “Editorial,”Journal of Teaching in Social Work45, no. 2 (2025): 179–87,https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2025.2472491.
4 Andrew G. D. Holmes, “Researcher Positionality: A Consideration of Its Influence and Place in Qualitative Research—A New Researcher Guide,”Shanlax International Journal of Education 8, no. 4 (2020): 1–10, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1268044.pdf.
5 Sarah Homan, “Why Positioning Identity Matters in Decolonising Research and Knowledge Production: How to Write a ‘Positionality Statement,'”The Equality Institute(blog), August 18, 2025, https://www.equalityinstitute.org/blog/how-to-write-a-positionality-statement, para. 6.
6 Heather E. Douglas,Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
7 Mary Hylton, Jason Ostrander, Patrick Meehan, “The Political Ideology and Political Engagement of Licensed Social Workers in the Age of Trump” (paper presented at the Society for Social Work and Research Annual Conference, Washington, DC, January 18, 2020), https://sswr.confex.com/sswr/2020/webprogram/Paper39379.html.
8 Stephen W. Stoeffler, Brendan P. Young, Michael W. Hassler, “Embracing Our Values: Social Work Faculty Progressivism in a Conservative World,”International Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics20, no. 1 (2023): 194–219, https://doi.org/10.55521/10-020-114.
9 Jason Manning, “Loud Liberals and Closet Conservatives,”Bullfish Hole (Substack), July 12, 2025, https://jasonmanning.substack.com/p/loud-liberals-and-closet-conservatives.
10 Nathan Gallo, Arnoldo Cantú, “Social Work Education’s DEI Capture Accelerated by Anti-Racist Task Force,” The Multilevel Mailer (Substack), January 19, 2026, https://www.jdhaltigan.com/p/social-work-educations-dei-capture.
11 See Ethical Standard 1. Social Workers’ Ethical Responsibilities to Clients.
12 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Social Workers,” Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Department of Labor, April 18, 2024.
13 See Table 1 in National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, State of the Behavioral Health Workforce, 2025 (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, 2025).
14 Joy J. Kim,The Licensed Social Work Workforce: Analyses of the 2024 Social Work Workforce Survey (Culpeper, VA: Association of Social Work Boards, 2025).
15 Edward Salsberg, Leo Quigley, Chelsea Richwine, Shari Sliwa, Kimberly Acquaviva, Karen Wyche, The Social Work Profession: Findings from Three Years of Surveys of New Social Workers (Washington, DC: Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity, 2020).
16 Latzer, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,” 24-25.
17 Tom Ginsburg, “Undisciplined Disciplines,” Inquisitive, February 20, 2025.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash